TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 262

EMBER’S POV

The transformation is fluid, dark fur receding into bronze skin, the wolf compressing into the tall, bloodied, naked figure of a man looking at me with an expression so tender it makes the terror worse because

monsters aren’t supposed to look at you like you’re their salvation.

“There you are.” A whisper, soft and reverent. “My little flame.”

He crouches in front of me where I’ve collapsed in the snow, my body shaking with the heat, the cold, the warring instincts of a woman who wants to run and a wolf who wants to surrender.

His hand reaches for my face, fingertips trembling, hovering an inch from my cheekbone.

“I forgive you,” he whispers, and the sincerity in his voice is the most horrifying part. “For the scratches. For the running. For all of it. I could never hurt you, Ember. Not you.” His gaze flickers toward the snowdrift where Queenie lies motionless, toward the tree where Nathaniel’s wolf crumpled. “Your friends,

unfortunately, will not receive the same mercy. They interfered. They tried to take you from me. And that

requires consequences.” His eyes return to mine, soft and golden and utterly mad. “But you I’ll put your

body out of its misery, my flame. I’ll give you what it’s begging for.”

His fingers brush my skin and the contact sends a bolt of sensation through me so intense my back

arches off the ground and a moan tears from my throat that I don’t consent to.

The heat SCREAMS yes, roaring through my veins, demanding more, demanding his hands everywhere, between my thighs where the ache is unbearable, or my breasts that are swollen and desperate for touch, on my neck where the mark should go, where every nerve ending is crying out for teeth and claim and

completion.

His hand slides from my cheek down the side of my neck, slow and worshipful, tracing my collarbone, moving lower, and my body is arching into his touch and my mind is screaming no and the war is being

lost inch by inch.

I bite down on my lip hard enough to taste blood and the tears spill from the corners of my eyes. streaming sideways into my hair, because my body is a stranger to me now and the woman inside it is

drowning.

And somewhere deep inside the fire, past the heat and the compound and the war between my flesh and my will, I reach out.

I reach out with something that lives in the marrow and the blood and the place where Sapphire used to speak before she went silent.

I reach through a fire in my veins and a light in my chest, through a thread that feels like the pathway home and a song I know by heart and the finishing of sentences and the other half of a puzzle I didn’t know! was solving until this moment.

whisper his name. Barely a sound. Barely a breath.

Knox.

Then the night tears open.

A ROAR rises from the earth itself, rolling through the forest with a depth and fury that vibrates through the ground under my back and through Rafael’s hand on my skin and through the marrow of every living thing within miles.

It carries something in its frequency that reaches past the heat, past the compound, past the desperate screaming hunger that has turned my body into an enemy, and it touches something deeper.

Something that goes still in a way the heat cannot reach and the compound cannot override.

Rafael’s hand freezes on my skin. His golden eyes blow wide with something I have never seen on his face before.

Fear.

The thing that crashes through the trees detonates.

Black fur, gold eyes, the size of a nightmare, an impact that catches Rafael full in the chest and rips him

off me and launches him through the air in a spinning arc that ends against a tree trunk sixty feet away

with a crack so loud it echoes off the mountains.

He hits the ground and doesn’t get up.

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